Field trip to Hawaii Public Radio

Yesterday the group of MPX 10s loaded onto a school bus and drove down to the Hawaii Public Radio station to deepen their understanding of our current topic: media literacy. Students met with the radio's director of public outreach Gene Evans, news reporter Bill Dorman, and sound technician Jason Taglianatti to hear about how public radio decides what makes it to the air.

When asked by students why the station doesn't cater more to the tastes of younger listeners (they have five shows which play exclusively classical music), Evans replied that younger listeners typically "don't have the chops or life experience to appreciate what we try to do here." He further explained that the radio believe "you gotta be challenged by the music and the news" suggesting it isn't the station's objective to play only things which are entertaining or pleasing to the ear.

 

Students asked questions about how the radio covers breaking news, whether radio has any advantages over tv, and how the decide which stories are newsworthy. See student blog posts about the field trip to read more about what they learned.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Photo-essay of Alchemist

Last week was a productive one in MPX humanities. Students worked on their photo-essays which told the story of various moments from our summer reading book The Alchemist by Paul Coelho. Students printed and mounted their photos, which are now on display in the classroom. Additionally, they wrote essays which explained how their photos utilized the elements of photography such as angle, zoom, and the rule of thirds to evoke moments from the summer reading.

My highlight of this project was working with students to edit their first drafts of their written essays. They got feedback from a partner in the class as well as from me, and so far the final drafts have shown significant improvement from the first. Several students commented that it is important to them to be able to have time to produce a high quality final product and that the revision process enabled them to do that on this project.

Excited about project based learning

I got my first taste of the amazing feeling of enough time and enough teachers to do project based learning successfully on a big scale! All four MPX teachers teamed up to plan the thirsty games with the purpose of giving the incoming freshman the experience of a full project cycle. Teams were provided dirty water and had time and tools to brainstorm a way to clean the water with limited tools.

Three 9th grade students planning to capture the steam released when they put their dirty water on a hot plate.

 

 

See colleague Mark Hines' curriculum snapshot on it here.

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Literary Magazine 2013

This year's layout just shows how far we have come as a class.


Things that we did differently this year:

1. Lots of creative writing during the fall with feedback cycle so students learned to give and receive meaningful feedback.

2. Each student created their own individual small zine using the class's work for content. This was when they learned to use Adobe InDesign effectively.

3. Integrated art from our Chinese sister school, Souzhou Lida Middle school.

4. Added a theme that connected the cover to the content (birds).

5. Invited a graphic designer to speak to the class about innovated layout.

6. Published digitally! Copies available for purchase here

Schools of the Future annual conference

We stayed until the end.

Leslie Witten, the library media specialist at Island Pacific Academy, and I attended the final session after an energizing day of professional development.  We were rewarded with gold at the end of the rainbow: Rob Mancabelli’s session on Personal Learning Networks.

Exhausted and happy

He explained that all classrooms are now blended; students don’t ever leave their online networks, regardless of school appropriate use policies for mobile devices. Modeling for students how to utilize these devices as tools to learn what they want to know is as valuable a skill as teaching them how to analyze a text.

It is not only a small radical group of educators who believe this but the very traditionally minded National Council of Teachers of English is also on board. According to their position statement: 
Twenty-first century readers and writers need to:

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology

• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally

• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes

• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information

• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts

• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

It was a great session and I’m glad we lingered long enough to catch it.

Community of Learners

Our independent school is very honored to receive the Schools of the Future grant (currently in year 4 of the 5-year cycle) which is dedicated to promoting 21st century skills in Hawaii's independent schools. As part of the grant the 13 receiving schools meet three times a year as a Community of Learners (CoL) to discuss what is working and how to improve. This time, Dale from DP art and Darci from elementary joined me in a day of discussion about backwards designing for more meaningful assessment.

Dale and I were asked to select a discipline and backwards plan a unit based on the mission and values of our school. This picture is what we came up with in terms of formative and summative assessments for a unit he his planning in art.

Honolulu Museum of Art

Our literary magazine class went to the Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House (previously known as the Contemporary Museum) for "Words off the wall: an evening of art, literature, and entertainment." It was an art opening for their new show which has everything to do with words and the educational programing director partnered with Mixed Innovative Arts to ensure there were plenty of hands on activities for students.

It was such a joy to go to a museum with students and have people come up to them and ask them to write on things. The Friday night field trip gave students lots of ideas to promote the literary magazine; a word wall with push pins went up in our school hallway the next week!